Summer Memory - A Bully in Tulsa

"Johnny, come out here!"

Karen was agitated -- more so than usual, anyway.  I was just irritated.  I was on my summer vacation, too.  I was right in the middle of doing nothing in particular, and didn't appreciate the interruption.

"What?" I demanded of my kid sister.  I was eight years old, and had no time for her five-year-old nonsense.

"Sharon and me are our riding bikes and there's a kid that won't let us ride past his house."

I got to my feet.  Probably another little snarky kid bugging my sister and cousin.  I followed them down the street.

Less than a block away stood a monster.  He had to be at least ten years old, and was holding a broom handle, minus the broom.  I had severe second thoughts.

"What do you want?" he sneered.

"You won't let my sister and cousin ride their bikes here."

I don't know where I got the courage to follow through with this confrontation.  I didn't care whether Karen could ride past this bit of road.  But, I saw cousin Sharon only once a year at best, and harbored a sort of crush on her.  A bit inbred and creepy maybe, but we were kids, and Jeff Foxworthy was still in diapers.

Back to the behemoth, who was saying,  "What are you gonna do about it?"

"You're gonna let 'em ride," I challenged.  "I'll make you."

His sneer grew wider, and he stepped forward, swinging his makeshift staff at me.

I caught the it in mid-arc and wrested it from his grip.  Then I laughed defiantly.  "There!" I gloated.  "You ain't got your stick!"

"So what?"  The bully yelled.  "You won't do nothin' with it!"  And once again he advanced, this time raising a threatening fist.

Without thinking, I swung the broom handle like a broadsword, connecting with the ogre's head with a resounding THWACK!

He yelled!  Oh, how he shouted, clutching his temple and swearing, dancing in a little circle.  The three of us stood, transfixed by the performance.

The boy stopped shouting long enough to give me a hateful glare.  "You won't do that again!  I dare you to do that again!"

I carefully parsed his words and decided that they formed an invitation to take another whack at it.  That's exactly what I did, repeating the first swing precisely, since it had worked so well.

The youthful roadblock, unfortunately, hadn't learned to duck, and so was soon repeating his Indian Pain Dance.  Possibly with even more volume and vehemence than before.

At this point, Karen -- always alert for authority figures -- shouted, "Someone's coming!"

Emerging from the nearest house was a weather-worn giant of a woman who could only be the kid's mother.

All my courage fled.  I dropped the broom handle and together we sprinted down the street, heedless of sharp rocks on bare feet, toward the sanctuary of Sharon's house.

Though I fled from the larger foe, I still considered myself the hero of thge day.  Sister Karen and cousin Sharon rode their bicycles peacefully for the rest of the day, while I heroically picked gravel from the soles of my feet.

My Haiku Attempts

Another day, more cleanup.

Trying to straighten things around here.  Am easily distracted.  I found an old writing exercise notebook, which I'll hang onto, at least until I get everything in there transcribed.  

It contains the haiku I tried to write when Robin encouraged me to try my hand.

Honestly, I only remembered one of them -- the one that Robin preserved in her own poetry book:

Puppy in the grass

Bites my fingers gently, then

I capture her snout.

She liked that one. 

I already published the raccoon one.  The rest are below the cut.

He who steals my trash, steals trash

Black-maskéd bandit
Boldly invades sanctity
Of my garbage can.

Unpacking

I finished unpacking a box today.

One of the things I have decided to do is to (finally) get stuff straightened up around here.  Because, if I don't do this, then when my time comes to go, I will leave this unbelievably distressing task to my kids. 

There's just so much stuff.  And a lot of it is still in boxes, from one, two, or even three moves ago.

One of those boxes has been in the corner of the kitchen, for fifteen years.

You read that right.  And it's not the only one, sitting out in plain sight, waiting for me to set aside time for it, all the time we lived in this house.

The top layer was mostly mementos from our china cabinet.  Boy, was that layer hard to get through.

The middle layer, and most of the bottom, was a set of stoneware dishes.  Our first set, if I recall correctly.  Unused for all those years, while we collected thrift shop Corel. I also found a huge ceramic stein that Robin painted for me for my birthday in 1981. 

And, inexplicably, a business sized envelope that contained...an owl pellet.

That one threw me for a loop.  It took several minutes just to figure out what the hell it was -- a few tiny bones, a small lump of fur, and unidentifiable clumps of...dried gunk.

Why an owl pellet?  Why would she save...

And then it hit me.  This was also from the early 80s.

We had been going to George Sarratt's house for D&D games for a while, and he'd told us about how he'd found his totem animal (Raccoon).  This was different from his chosen totem image, the Thunderbird, which he always wore around his neck.  He saw Raccoon looking back at him from the mirror one day.  Totem animals, he told us, choose you.  And that got Robin wondering what hers might be. 

One night, when we were visiting Natalie and illicitly spending the night in a reserved common room at her dormitory,  Robin awoke in the wee hours.  Where a lamp was sitting on an end table, she saw instead a large great horned owl.  Only for a few seconds.  When the vision passed, she managed to convince herself that it was a dream, or an hallucination.  Surely not a totem animal.  She couldn't possibly be associated with the Owl.  She'd done her reading; owls were stupid animals.

While we were driving back to Omaha from that visit, she noticed something and asked me to pull over.  When I did, and backed up to the right place, we found a dead owl by the side of the road.

I've been on a lot of roads, and seen a lot of roadkill.  Not once before, nor since, has any of it been an owl.

Robin still rejected this message.  I teased her, asking if she needed a live owl to come to her.  She acknowledged that, maybe, that would be a strong enough message.

Only a couple of weeks after that, I was walking home from collecting an unemployment check (at this time I was not very far from enlisting in the Army), when I saw a small owl in the snow.  It was alive, but did not seem well.  At least, it didn't attempt to fly away.  Other people were around; none of them knew anything about owls.  One of them did have a cardboard box, though.  I took it home. 

Once in the warmth of our house, the owl seemed to perk up a bit.  I learned to wear gloves when handling it.  We tried to identify its species, but with only an old encyclopedia set to work with (this was before the Internet), we didn't get very far.  We surmised that it could have been a very young great horned, but that was completely the wrong season for that.  Of course, with our lack of experience, and lack of complete resources, we were probably completely off the mark.

Of course, I did tease Robin about this whole thing.  She had to acknowledge that Owl had come to her.

We kept that bird in our house for about a week.  It got better, but it refused to eat anything I offered it.  Everything, that is, except for one dead mouse that George trapped and saved for us, assuring us that he had no poisons in his house.  The bird snapped that tidbit right up. 

And, not long afterward, yakked up an owl pellet.  Like they do.

And Robin saved the pellet. 

I wanted so badly to tease her about this tonight. 

Instead, I poured some scotch, and wrote about it. 

We released the owl that night, for a couple of reasons.  Mostly because it seemed to be doing much better, having warmed up and eaten, and the weather outside was warmer too.  And secondarily, we had learned that, as a raptor bird, the state required a license to keep them.  We didn't have the money nor the training to get a raptor license.  Kind of a pity.  We'd gotten used to each other.  It never tried to attack us, it would perch on my gloved hand when approached.  Robin held it a couple of times, too. 

But it did hang around our house.  We heard it, often. 

She collected owl imagery ever since that day.

I'd really like to hear owls around here.  

Cakes

Last night I baked cakes.

Erin invited me to her daughter's 2-year birthday party, and I volunteered to make the cake.  Then I volunteered to make more than one, because some of her family members are eating low-carb, and, well...I know a little bit about low-carb.

I used the NordicWare pans that I was buying for Robin, because she loved them.  The cake for the little girl was made in the castle, which I've used once before, on Robin's last birthday.  The low-carb cakes were baked in the 2-cottage pan, which I never used at all - that was to be used this Christmas, for gingerbread cakes.

I used almond flour in a recipe made for coconut flour, and nearly made a mess of it, but remembered what Robin taught me and just added more dry ingredients, guessing correctly because we've done this before.

Tonight I frosted them.  I made sugar-free buttercream for the low-carb cakes, just the way she taught me.  Probably sweeter than she would have liked.  The frosting is really a hack job, and covers up the beautiful detail of the cake, but I expect the 2-year-old will forgive me, especially since there are 11 Disney princess figures standing around the cakes.

I made sure to thank Robin for every lesson I used.

Afterward, I put together my meds.  This is the first time I've needed to do that since...since.  We always did that at the same time, each of us with a tray in front, silently counting out pills, occasionally asking each other for spares.  "Do you have any multivitamins?  I'm out."  That kind of thing.  I ran out of D3 and couldn't ask.  Instead, I went to the closet where I had put away her box of meds, and found her bottle of D supplements. 

I thanked her.

Tomorrow or Monday I'll be fixing some clothing.  I'll be using sewing techniques she taught me, and I'll thank her then, too.

I'm remembering the good things.  That's progress, right?  But these memories make me sad, too, because we won't me making more of them.

An Old Belt

I've been telling myself for weeks that I need a new belt.  Maybe months.

When Robin switched from the "regular" low carb diet, to ketogenic, it was always for health reasons.  It got her blood sugars and blood pressure under control.  When I joined her in that way of eating, it worked so well for me that I was able to stop taking Metformin completely.  My most recent A1C was 5.5, and my doctor was asking me for keto tips.

But, for quite a while, even though it worked for health, she despaired that it didn't seem to help her weight.  Even following the strictest keto plan, limiting to 20 whole carbs a day, no more than seven per meal, her weight was stubborn.

To be honest, I think I started to lose weight before she did -- she mentioned it a couple of times -- but I didn't want to get on the scale, because I thought she'd get more frustrated if I confirmed that I was dropping pounds and she wasn't.  When she finally did start to lose weight, in 2018, she got absolutely giddy about it.  She started ordering clothes in the next size down, for both of us.

I think that this is why, after her death, one of the first things I wanted to do was clear out her clothing.  There's so much in this house, projects that she had put aside -- maybe temporarily, or maybe permanently abandoned -- that she never got to finish, but the clothing was what she was excited about most recently.  So, that's what hurts the most to see.

And that's why I've put off buying a new belt.  My pants are dropping off me, and the most recent belt purchase doesn't keep them tight enough.  But buying clothes for myself, even a belt ... that's not something I feel up to doing right now.

Today, when grabbing briefs from my underwear drawer, I noticed a coil of leather.  It was an old belt, one I hadn't worn in so long I can't even remember when.  I must have expanded past its limits and replaced it, but being a hoarder, I put it up and forgot about it.

At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened.

On a related note, one of the pocket zippers on my vest has been broken for a while.  I realized recently that I was going to have to fix it, or get a new vest, before a trip coming up.  Something else I've been putting off, for the same reason.

Last night, I remembered that there is a box full of zippers in the basement.  Robin inherited it from her mom, who had been saving it for years, and we in turn have been saving it (along with a bunch of other stuff) for years.  I found a perfect fit, almost a perfect color match, and fixed the vest.

At some level, I'd like to believe that she's still taking care of me.

A Bluebird Cries

While running the vacuum today, I saw an index card booklet had fallen from Robin's desk near her chair.  I don't go near that area often.  I use her computer once in a while to register books for the Halloween giveaway, but haven't done much straightening there.

This was a reminder of why.